Here you will find reviews of the trashiest books ever written, forgotten classics, paperback head-spinners, and the just plain weird. Someone had to read these books, and thank god it's not you.
New reviews appear constantly...like Magic!
Absolved - the self-published militia novel that inspired the 2011 Waffle House Terror Plot.
AMERIKA - Very Important Novelization of the 80's miniseries about Commies Taking Over America!
Amityville: The Final Chapter - the Amityville Saga gets very, very stupid.
The Closed Circle - Satanic cult ridiculosity brought to you by the fine folks at Playboy Publishing.
The Park is Mine - the greatest book about a crazed Vietnam Vet taking over Central Park ever written.
The Little People - Nazi leprechauns...born in the concentration camps and engineered for sin!
The Other and Harvest Home - Thomas Tryon's forgotten blockbusters launched the 70's horror revival.
Feast - Graham Masterton's cannibal classic is so bonkers Jesus has to appear and sort everything out.
The Rats and The Fog - James Herbert's pub rock horror novels are full of puke, n'blood, n'rats, rats, rats!
The Amulet - Michael McDowell's Southern gothic gore fiesta is Trash Faulkner.
The Auctioneer - if Cormac McCarthy wrote Needful Things it would look like Joan Samson's one-off classic.
Hobgoblin - remember when everyone thought D&D was sending us all to Hell? No? Here's a refresher.
The Sucking Pit and The Walking Dead - Guy N. Smith gives his readers more than crabs. Unfortunately.
Maynard's House - it's getting all Yankee up in here, ya'll. Now a Vietnam vet takes on a Maine witch.
Fatal Beauty vs. Small World - William Schoell brings killer breast implants. Tabitha King brings shrinking.
Wurm - killer worms from the ocean floor. Oh, I'm sorry. Wurms.
Dead White and Black Christmas - have some killer clowns and axe murderers for Christmas!
Fatal Beauty and Small World - Stephen King's wife writes about miniature people, also worms do plastic surgery!
Familiar Spirit and Gabriel - two 80's horror paperbacks from the deeply perverse Lisa Tuttle.
The Last Canadian - because there can be only one!
The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun - the book that has disappointed me for 20 years.
Coma - Robin Cook's forgotten bestseller about doctors and computers.
Koko - I wasn't a Peter Straub fan until I read his blockbuster Vietnam novel.
Burnt Offerings - the forgotten haunted house bestseller from 1973 that's actually pretty good!
The Ninth Configuration - William Peter Blatty's prequel to The Exorcist.
Beloved - why hasn't the horror genre claimed Toni Morrison's ghost story as one of its best books?
Alabaster - Osamu Tezuka's manga about a black man with invisible skin is pretty freaky stuff.
The Strangers - this 80's horror paperback about hidden psychopaths will teach you to be careful who you marry.
Miss Finney Kills Now and Then - a truly berserk trash classic. Like a slasher written by John Waters.
Black in Time - get it? GET IT???? It's about black nationalists and white supremacists going to war using time travel!!!!
XY - a gender-bender horror novel that feels like a lost Cronenberg movie.
Shadowland - what if Harry Potter was written for grown-ups?
Such a Good Baby - a book about a killer baby, featuring great, glistening pools of puke.
Bloodrush - how come race is so complicated in the South and what's that got to do with unlimited quantities of bull semen?
The Flying Eyes - you know what Mad Men left out? The flying, oozing, dripping, giant eyes that haunted 1950's America.
The Sentinel - Or, How To Throw a Birthday Party for Your Cat!
Phoenix: Dark Messiah - in post-apocalyptic America, only the coolest dudes with the biggest dongs and hugest guns will survive.
Abracadabra - the only good magician is a dead magician.
Toy Cemetery - books about toys fighting a war against kiddie porn producers and the products of incest don't get any better than this.
Slob - he started as a serial killer, wound up as a superhero.
Skeleton Doctors - two books about the worst doctors of all.
Insects Hate Us! - Blood Worm, Squelch, and Blight. Three books about our tiniest enemies.
Phantom of the Soap Opera - if you want to move to NYC and star in soap operas, you MUST read this one book.
Let's Get It On - The Night Visitor and Taurus...either Satan's sticking it up your butt or a bull is stabbing you in the scrotum.
The Omen Novelizations - five books about three movies, and in only one of them does a lonely man befriend a dead chicken.
Satan's Child - the lost folk horror link.
The Abyss - it's like Bruce Springsteen rewrote Dante's Inferno only with more beer.
The Tribe - Jewish horror was a part of the horror paperback market, and this is probably its pinnacle.
The Moonchild - basically a Hammer horror movie in book form about a kid with a monstrous wanking arm that kills.
Dark Angel - Catholic-sploitation was a big paperback genre and this is peak achievement. True lunacy.
Satan Sublets - what happens when Satan is your landlord? Nothing good!
The Sendai - based on scientific truth! There are mice with chicken heads out there just running around!!!! (and killer babies)
Snowman - Yeti wants to come to America and ruin all our stuff. What a creep.
The Sibling - the touching Yuletide tale of a brother who loves his sister so much he gives her little "cadaver kisses".
Slay Bells - teens in peril! Trapped in a blizzard at the local mall! Stalked by Santa!
The Foundling - she plays a mean guitar, gaslights her mom, and Charles Manson was her dad. Kids today.
The Shadow Man - home computers can help you with your taxes and send witches into the past with their timeshifter beams.
Kodiak! - the Jaws of killer bear books, only better. For god's sake, it's got an exclamation mark in the title.
Brainchild - before he started ghost writing VC Andrews books, Andrew Neiderman was a hell of an author in his own right.
Keeper of the Children - killer marionettes, mannequins, teddy bears, and scarecrows. Pure nightmare fuel.
The Stigma - doomcore book about possessed girls and demonic dogs who just want to be your cuddle buddy.
The Farm - old McDonald's death farm of destruction.
The Searing - the scariest thing of all is the female orgasm, according to this book.
Seed of Evil - how not to pick up Satan in a bar.
Childgrave - yet another beautifully written horror paperback from Ken Greenhall.
Isobel - the story of a Scottish lass seduced by a French Satanist who wears leather.
The Orpheus Process - bad science plus bad parenting in the most X-treme 90's horror novels.
Night Train - gentrification versus demons from Hell in the subway tunnels of New York City.
Killer - the ultimate killer whale vs. human arms epic ever written.
Psychic Spawn - what happens when you raise a race of psychic Nazi super-babies and they just want to screw off and get drunk?
Nightlife - it's Miami Vice meets Crocodile Dundee only with more were-piranhas.
The Glow - it's Satanism with jogging and tofu loaf.
Nightblood - for everyone who thought 'Salem's Lot needed more uzis, it's the most 90's vampire book of all time.
Vessel - all about immortal serial killers abducting young Midwestern girls and making them constipated.
Blood Sisters - part 2 of my series, "What the Hell is the Matter with the Midwest?"
The Shinglo - it's Stephen King doing Vietnam with some Home Alone at the climax.
Invasion USA - the only thing stupider and more satisfying than this Chuck Norris movie is its novelization.
Fantasma - the all-Italian Mafia vs. Monsters novel from the early 90's.
Without Warning - the first review from my Paperbacks from Hell newsletter is this Yuletide gem.
Beast - come and see Bigfoot get it on. A lot.
Carnivore - a T.Rex hatches in the Antarctic and eats a lot of people in a novel that could have been titles Assholes on Ice.
Condor - even B-list Graham Masterton is still worthy of your time and attention.
Bronson: Blind Rage - remember Death Wish? Here's the paperbacks series knock-off version.
The Hell Candidate and The Nightmare Candidate - it's a two-for-one election special!
The Tea Party - Charles L. Grant wants to invite you to one!
Ten Little Indians - less a sensitive depiction of Native American life, and more about invisible dwarf cannibal Native Americans.
The Girl Who Owned a City - hey, kids! Want to experience the end of all life as we know it?
USSA - suck on my rock n’roll, Commies! Oh, wait, the bad guys in this book are right-wing Republicans? Never mind.
After the Bomb - sometimes you need a small nuclear war to escape from your brother’s shadow.
In the Seventies, England specialized in rabies panic novels like Rabid and The Folly.
Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic - because teenage alcoholics are the best alcoholics of all.
The Visitor - modern day metaphor for gentrification or trashy novel about a rat trying to gnaw off a dude’s balls?
So many Bigfoot books, like Snowbeast and Snowman and The Spirit and Monster and Sasquatch: Monster of the Northwest Woods.
Shadow of the Beast - stare into the eyes of Bigfoot.
From the author of The Black Exorcist comes one of the few African-American horror paperbacks of the Seventies and Eighties, Devil Dolls.
Ring Ma Bell with some telephone horror like Phone Call and The Shadow Knows from the woman who wrote Stanley Kubricks The Shining.
On the Devil’s Court and Unnatural Talent are both horror YA novels about basketball and I regret to inform you that I have reviewed them.
After Go Ask Alice, Dr. Beatrice Sparks turned in another “Anonymous” novel, this time about Satanism! Welcome to Jay’s Journal!
For those about to rock, I’ve got a concept album’s worth of rock n’roll horror novel reviews like Night Music, the amazingly covered Stage Fright, the super-sadistic Kill Riff, a rock n’roll book for kids, The Bargain, and the one splatterpunk rock novel to rule them all, The Scream.
Call of the Wendigo - finally! A book that explains both the dangers of going outside and the horrible realities of Canada.
Are you thinking of going outdoors? Read Signpost to Terror and Walking Out first so that you can make an informed decision.
What the hell? It’s a pandemic, man. Why not read Ulysses before you die?
What if The Shining took place in Maine and involved a lot more sex? You get The Shapechanger.
The Lake and Saurian — two books about underwater lake monsters that show you just how good and just how boring the underwater lake monster genre can be.
The Babysitter Series is R.L. Stine’s masterpiece, and it is very stupid.
Welcome to the Cruel, Cool world of Christopher Pike with three early novels, Slumber Party, Weekend, and Fall Into Darkness.
There’s more Christopher Pike, with reviews of Die Softly, The Eternal Enemy, The Immortal, and Monster.
No one can just read one Pike book, so have some reviews of The Wicked Heart, The Lost Mind, See You Later, and his ultimate freakout, Whisper of Death.
The Visitor may just be the bleakest book Christopher Pike ever wrote.
The Hunger might just be the last truly great vampire novel.
Dracula in Love might just be the last book to really contemplate Dracula’s penis.
The Keep by F. Paul Wilson is one of the major books of Jewish horror.
Among the Dolls by William Sleator shows you pants-wetting terror in an antique dollhouse.
Prank Night, the best celebration of Halloween, brain-sucking, and bad poetry you’ll ever read!